Dollar sign
| $ | |
|---|---|
Dollar sign | |
| Other names | Peso sign |
| In Unicode | U+0024 $ DOLLAR SIGN ($) |
| Currency | |
| Currency | Many (see dollar, peso) |
| Graphical variants | |
 | |
 Category | |
The dollar sign, also known as the peso sign, is a
The sign is also used in several compound currency symbols, such as the Brazilian real (R$) and the United States dollar (US$): in local use, the nationality prefix is usually omitted. In countries that have other currency symbols, the US dollar is often assumed and the "US" prefix omitted.
The one- and two-stroke versions are often considered mere stylistic (typeface) variants, although in some places and epochs one of them may have been specifically assigned, by law or custom, to a specific currency. The Unicode computer encoding standard defines a single code for both.
In most English-speaking countries that use that symbol, it is placed to the left of the amount specified, e.g. "$1", read as "one dollar".
History
The symbol appears in business correspondence in the 1770s from Spanish America, the early independent U.S., British America and Britain, referring to the Spanish American peso,[1][2] also known as "Spanish dollar" or "piece of eight" in British America. Those coins provided the model for the currency that the United States adopted in 1792, and for the larger coins of the new Spanish American republics, such as the Mexican peso, Argentine peso, Peruvian real, and Bolivian sol coins.
With the Coinage Act of 1792, the United States Congress created the U.S. dollar, defining it to have "the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current"[3][4] but a variety of foreign coins were deemed to be legal tender until the Coinage Act of 1857 ended this status.[5]
The earliest U.S. dollar coins did not have any dollar symbol. The first occurrence in print is claimed to be from 1790s, by a Philadelphia printer Archibald Binny, creator of the Monticello typeface.[6] The $1 United States Note issued by the United States in 1869 included a large symbol consisting of a "U" with the right bar overlapping an "S" like a single-bar dollar sign, as well as a very small double-stroke dollar sign in the legal warning against forgery.[7]
Earlier history of the symbol
It is still uncertain, however, how the dollar sign came to represent the Spanish American peso. There are currently several competing hypotheses:
- The most widely accepted theory holds that the sign grew out of the Spanish and Spanish American scribal abbreviation "ps" for pesos. A study of late 18th- and early 19th-century manuscripts shows that the s gradually came to be written over the p, developing into a close equivalent to the "$" mark.[8][9][10][11][12] Oliver Pollock, a wealthy Irish trader and early supporter of the American Revolution, used the abbreviation "ps", sometimes run together in a way that almost exactly resembled the dollar sign, in a letter dated 1778.[6][13] There are documents showing the common use of the two-stroke version in Portugal already by 1775.[14]
- Another hypothesis derives the sign from a depiction of the
- A variant of the above theory claims that the sign comes from the mark of the mint at Potosí, where a large portion of the Spanish Empire's silver was mined. A feature on these coins were the letters "P T S I" superimposed. The core of this monogram is a (single-stroked) "$" sign.[17]
- Yet another hypothesis notes that the English word "dollar" for the Spanish piece of eight originally came (through Joachimsthaler or thaler, a similar large German silver coin that was widely used in Europe. It is therefore conjectured that the dollar sign derived from a symbol consisting of a superimposing S and I or J that was used to denote the German silver coin. Such symbol appears in the 1686 edition of An Introduction to Merchants' Accounts by John Collins.[18] Alternatively, the symbol could have come from a snake and cross emblem on the thaler coins.[6]
Less likely theories
The following theories seem to have been discredited or contradicted by documentary evidence:
- In 1937, historian James Alton James claimed that the symbol with two strokes was an adapted design of patriot Robert Morris in 1778, in letters written to Pollock.[19][20][13]
- In 1939, H. M. Larson suggested that the sign could derive from a combination of the Greek character "psi" (ψ) and "S".[21]
- A theory claims that the sign started off as a monogram of "US", with a narrow "U" superimposed on the "S"; the bottom part of the "U" would have been lost, producing the dollar sign with two vertical lines. This theory was mentioned in letters to Notes and Queries in 1876.[8] Henry Towne begins his classic 1886 essay on management with this theory.[22] This was also claimed by Ayn Rand in her 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged; in her version of the theory the monogram "US" would have been used on money bags issued by the United States Mint.[23][6]
- Authors T. Seijas and J. Frederick noted that the captors of slaves in Spanish territories sometimes branded enslaved people with a symbol very similar to a one-barred dollar sign. Esclavo is Spanish for "slave," and clavo means nail. A dollar sign would then be S + clavo.[15]
- A theory often cited in
Currencies that use the dollar sign
As symbol of the currency
The numerous currencies called "dollar" use the dollar sign to express money amounts. The sign is also generally used for the many currencies called "peso" (except the Philippine peso, which uses the symbol "₱"). Within a country the dollar/peso sign may be used alone. In other cases, and to avoid ambiguity in international usage, it is usually combined with other glyphs, e.g. CA$ or Can$ for Canadian dollar. Particularly in professional contexts, the unambiguous ISO 4217 three letter code (AUD, MXN, USD, etc.) is preferred.
The dollar sign, alone or in combination with other glyphs, is or was used to denote several currencies with other names, including:
- Brazilian cruzeiro (various currencies, all defunct): ₢$, CR, etc.
, Cr, NCr - Brazilian real: R$
- Ethiopian birr (until 1976): E$
- Macanese pataca: MOP$
- Nicaraguan córdoba: C$
- Samoan tālā (a transliteration of the word dollar): $
- Tongan paʻanga: T$
- Malaya and British Borneo dollar (1957–1967): $
- Malaysian ringgit (1967–1997): $, M$, M
- South Vietnamese đồng (1953–1975): $,
Prefix or suffix
In the United States, Mexico, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Pacific Island nations, and English-speaking Canada, the sign is written before the number ("$5"), even though the word is written or spoken after it ("five dollars", "cinco pesos"). In French-speaking Canada, exceptionally, the dollar symbol usually appears after the number,
Use in the Portuguese Empire
In Portugal, Brazil, and other parts of the
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500 meant "123500 réis". This usage is attested in 1775, but may be older by a century or more.[14] It is always written with two vertical lines: 
. It is the official sign of the Cape Verdean escudo (ISO 4217In 1911, Portugal redefined the national currency as the
50 meant 123.50 escudos or 123 escudos and 50 centavos. This usage ended in 2002 when the country switched to the euro. (A similar scheme to use a letter symbol instead of a decimal point is used by the RKM codeBrazil retained the real and the cifrão as thousands separator until 1942, when it switched to the Brazilian cruzeiro, with comma as the decimals separator. The dollar sign, officially with one stroke but often rendered with two, was retained as part of the currency symbol "Cr$", so one would write Cr$13,50 for 13 cruzeiros and 50 centavos.[27]
The cifrão was formerly used by the
Outside the Portuguese cultural sphere, the South Vietnamese đồng before 1975 used a method similar to the cifrão to separate values of đồng from its decimal subunit xu. For example, 750 meant 7 đồng and 50 xu.
One stroke vs. two strokes
In some places and at some times, the one- and two-stroke variants have been used in the same contexts to distinguish between the U.S. dollar and other local currency, such as the former Portuguese escudo.[26]
However, such usage is not standardized, and the
When a specific variant is not mandated by law or custom, the choice is usually a matter of expediency or aesthetic preference. Both versions were used in the US in the 18th century. (An 1861
Use in computer software
Because of its use in early American computer applications such as business accounting, the dollar sign is almost universally present in computer
Encoding
The dollar sign "$" has Unicode code point U+0024 (inherited from
- U+0024 $ DOLLAR SIGN ($)[a]
There are no separate encodings for one- and two-line variants. The choice is typeface-dependent, they are allographs. However, there are three other code points that originate from other East Asian standards: the Taiwanese small form variant, the CJK fullwidth form, and the Japanese emoji. The glyphs for these code points are typically larger or smaller than the primary code point, but the difference is mostly aesthetic or typographic, and the meanings of the symbols are the same.
- U+FE69 ﹩ SMALL DOLLAR SIGN
- U+FF04 ＄ FULLWIDTH DOLLAR SIGN
- U+1F4B2 💲 HEAVY DOLLAR SIGN
However, for usage as the special character in various computing applications (see following sections), U+0024 is typically the only code that is recognized.
Support for the two-line variant varies. As of 2019,[update] the Unicode standard considers the distinction between one- and two-bar dollar signs a stylistic distinction between fonts, and has no separate code point for the cifrão. The symbol is not in the October 2019 "pipeline",[34] though it has been requested formally.[26]
Among others, the following fonts display a double-bar dollar sign for code point 0024:[
In LaTeX, with the textcomp package installed, the cifrão () can be input using the command \textdollaroldstyle. However, because of font substitution and the lack of a dedicated code point, the author of an electronic document who uses one of these fonts intending to represent a cifrão cannot be sure that every reader will see a double-bar glyph rather than the single barred version. Because of the continued lack of support in Unicode, a single bar dollar sign is frequently employed in its place even for official purposes.[29][35] Where there is any risk of misunderstanding, the ISO 4217 three-letter acronym is used.
Programming languages
- In BASIC,
$is appended to a variable name to define that variable’s data type as a character string, for example,H$="Hello, world!". In discussion, the variableH$would be referred to as “H string.” $is prefixed to names to definearrays$array[7]and hashes$hash{foo}.- In , use it to mark the place where the result of an expression elsewhere should be inserted into text.
$is used for defining hexadecimal constants in some variants ofDelphi.$is used in the ALGOL 68 language to delimit transput format regions.$is used in the TeX typesetting language to delimit mathematical regions.- In many versions of FORTRAN 66,
$could be used as an alternative to a quotation mark for delimiting strings. - In PL/M,
$can be used to put a visible separation between words in compound identifiers. For example,Some$Namerefers to the same thing as 'SomeName'. - In Haskell,
$is used as a function application operator. - In an AutoHotkey script, a hotkey declared with
$is not triggered by a 'Send' command elsewhere in the script. - The Prototype.jslibrary defines it similarly for querying.
- In VB.NET, or any CLR supported language.
- In Erlang, the dollar sign precedes character literals. The dollar sign as a character can be written
$$. - In Picture clauseto depict a floating currency symbol as the left most character. The default symbol is
$; however, if theCURRENCY=orCURRENCY SIGNclause is specified, many other symbols can be used. - In some assembly languages, such as MIPS, the
$sign is used to represent registers. - In Honeywell 6000 series assembler, the
$sign, when used as an address, meant the address of the instruction in which it appeared. - In CMS-2, the
$sign is used as a statement terminator. - In R, the
$sign is used as a subsetting operator. - In Q (programming language from Kx Systems), the
$sign is used as a casting/padding/enumeration/conditional operator. - In Sass, the
$sign is prefixed to define a variable. - In Svelte, the
$sign can be used to mark reactive statements.
Operating systems
- In escape keyto complete a line of input.
- In Microsoft Windows,
$is appended to the share name to hide a shared folder or resource. For example,\\server\sharewill be visible to other computers on a network, while\\server\share$will be accessible only by explicit reference. Hiding a shared folder or resource will not alter its access permissions but may render it inaccessible to programs or other functions which rely on its visibility. Most administrative shares are hidden in this way. - In the LDAPdirectory access protocol,
$is used as a line separator in various standard entry attributes such aspostalAddress. - In the UNIVAC EXEC 8operating system,
$means "system". It is appended to entities such as the names of system files, the "sender" name in messages sent by the operator, and the default names of system-created files (like compiler output) when no specific name is specified (e.g.,TPF$,NAME$, etc.) - In RISC OS,
$is used in system variables to separate the application name from the variables specific to that application. For exampleDraw$Dirspecifies the directory where the!Drawapplication is located. It is also used to refer to the root directory of a file system.
Applications
- Microsoft Excel[37] and other spreadsheet software use the dollar sign ($) to denote a fixed row, fixed column reference, or an absolute cell reference.
- The dollar sign introduces a subfield delimiter in computer coding of library catalog records.
$matches the end of a line or string in , and derivatives.
Other uses
The symbol is sometimes used derisively, in place of the letter S, to indicate greed or excess money such as in "
In
A dollar symbol is used as
In the 1993 version of the Turkmen Latin alphabet $ was used as a transliteration of the Cyrillic letter Ш, in 1999 was replaced by the letter Ş.
See also
- Euro sign
- Indian rupee sign
- Pound sign
- Ruble sign
- Rupee sign
- Spanish dollar
- Turkish lira sign
- Yen and yuan sign
- Won sign
Explanatory notes
References
Citations
- JSTOR 967081.
- ISSN 0161-7370.
- ^ "Section 9 of the Coinage Act of 1792". Memory.loc.gov. Archived from the original on 29 July 2020. Retrieved 24 August 2010.
- ^ Meredith, Stephanie (6 April 2017). "Coinage Act of April 2, 1792 | U.S. Mint". United States Mint. p. 3. Retrieved 12 August 2024.
- ISSN 0022-0507.
- ^ a b c d Hephzibah Anderson (2019): "The curious origins of the dollar symbol Archived 12 August 2021 at the Wayback Machine". Online article at the BBC website, dated 29 May 2019. Accessed on 2021-08-12.
- ^ Reverse of $1 United States Note (Greenback), series of 1869
- ^ ISBN 9780486677668.
- JSTOR 2506275.
- ^ parallel linesrepresented one of the many abbreviations of 'P,' and the 'S' indicated the plural. The abbreviation '$.' was also used for the peso, and is still used in Argentina.
- ISBN 84-300-9090-8.
- ^ Bureau of Engraving and Printing. "What is the origin of the $ sign?". Resources: FAQs. Archived from the original on 9 April 2016. Retrieved 8 April 2016.
- ^ a b c Joshua D. Rothman (2018): "The Curious Origins of the Dollar Sign Archived 12 August 2021 at the Wayback Machine" Online article on the We're History website, dated 2018-04-01. Accessed on 2021-08-12.
- ^ a b João Joseph Du Beux (1775): Receipt of 270$000 Rs. Archived 12 August 2021 at the Wayback Machine for purchase by of 50 volumes of the Acta Santorum by the College of the Carmo of Coimbra. Quote: "Recebemos [...] a quantia de Duzentos Settenta mil reis[...] por Clareza passamos este Coimbra 15 de Março de 1775. São 270000 Rs". Cartório do Colégio do Carmo, Maço 35, n.o 17. apud ALMEIDA, Manuel Lopes in "Livro, livreiros, impressores em documentos da Universidade", Arquivo de Bibliografia Portuguesa, ano X–XII, Atlântida, Coimbra, 1964–66, n o 37–48.
- ^ ISBN 9781538100462.
- ^ Ulrich Theobald (2016): "Qing Period Money: Foreign Silver 'Dollars' Archived 9 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine". Online article in the website ChinaKnowledge.de - An Encyclopaedia on Chinese History, Literature and Art, dated Apr 13, 2016. Accessed on 2021-08-14.
- ISBN 9781452105598
- ^ Florence Edler de Roover. Concerning the Ancestry of the Dollar Sign. - Bulletin of the Business Historical Society. Vol. 19, No. 2 (Apr., 1945), pp. 63-64 Archived 26 September 2018 at the Wayback Machine
- ISBN 978-0-8369-5527-9.
- ^ James, James Alton (1929). "'Robert Morris, Financier of the Revolution in the West'". The Mississippi Valley Historical Review.
- JSTOR 3111350.
- ^ Towne, Henry R. (1886). "Engineer as an Economist". in Transactions of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New York City: American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
- ^ (2018): "Where did the dollar sign come from? Archived 12 August 2021 at the Wayback Machine" Online article of the History channel website, dated 2018-08-22. Accessed on 2021-08-12.
- ^ (2015): "Origem do Cifrão". Note on the website of the Casa da Moeda do Brasil (Brazilian Mint). Accessed on 2021-08-12.
- ^ "Banque de dépannage linguistique - Somme d'argent". Office québécois de la langue française. Archived from the original on 29 September 2022. Retrieved 31 October 2022.
- ^ a b c Eduardo Marín Silva (22 July 2019). "Currency signs missing in Unicode" (PDF). Unicode Consortium. Archived (PDF) from the original on 31 August 2021. Retrieved 12 August 2021.
- ^ (1960): Price "Cr$ 15,00" on the front cover Archived 14 August 2021 at the Wayback Machine of the 1960-05-07 issue of O Cruzeiro magazine, reproduced on the Muzeez website on 2016-12-105. Accessed on 2021-08-14.
- ^ Lisbon-tourist-guide.com. "Portuguese Escudo Archived 2 October 2022 at the Wayback Machine." 2008.
- ^ a b Banco de Cabo Verde. "Moedas Archived 2011-01-22 at the Wayback Machine." Accessed 25 Feb 2011.
- ^ Casa da Moeda. "Origem do Cifrão" (in Portuguese). Casadamoeda.gov.br. Archived from the original on 12 March 2018. Retrieved 11 March 2018.
- ^ a b "C0 Controls and Basic Latin | Range: 0000–007F" (PDF). The Unicode Standard, Version 15.1. Unicode Consortium.
- ^ "24 Character entity references in HTML 4". www.w3.org. Archived from the original on 1 April 2018. Retrieved 7 April 2018.
The following sections present the complete lists of character entity references
- ^ "8.5 Named character references". Archived from the original on 5 August 2017. Retrieved 7 April 2018.
dollar; U+00024 $
- ^ "Proposed New Characters: The Pipeline". Unicode Consortium. 11 October 2019. Archived from the original on 31 March 2017. Retrieved 26 December 2019.
- ^ Banco Central do Brasil. "Currency table. Archived 14 May 2017 at the Wayback Machine" Accessed 24 Feb 2011.
- ^ Kildall, Gary. Computer Connections.
- ^ "Relative & Absolute Cell References in Excel". Archived from the original on 17 March 2015. Retrieved 23 April 2015.
- ISBN 9780195126280.
- ^ "Scrabble Glossary". Tucson Scrabble Club. Archived from the original on 30 August 2011. Retrieved 6 February 2012.
- ^ Weinberg, Alvin M.; Wigner, Eugene P. (1958). The Physical Theory of Neutron Chain Reactors. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p. 595.
- ^ "DOE Fundamentals: Nuclear Physics and Reactor Theory: Module 4: Reactor Theory (Reactor Operations)" (PDF). U. S. Department of Energy. n.d. p. 16. Archived (PDF) from the original on 27 May 2022. Retrieved 25 July 2022.
General and cited sources
- ISBN 0-486-67766-4. Contains section on the history of the dollar sign, with much documentary evidence supporting the "pesos" hypothesis.
- Cuhaj, George (2009). Standard Catalog of United States Paper Money (28th ed.). Krause Publications. ISBN 978-0-89689-939-1.
- Ovason, David (30 November 2004). The Secret Symbols of the Dollar Bill (Reprint ed.). Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 0-06-053045-6.
External links
Media related to Dollar sign at Wikimedia Commons
